Thursday, February 28, 2013

John Gruber, on Sergey Brin’s claim that Google Glass is a way beyond the antisocial smartphone:

I can see the argument that dicking around with our phones in public is not cool, that we should pay more attention to our companions and surroundings, and less to our computer displays. Strapping a computer display to your face is not the answer.

Many thanks for the persimmons. These meant more to me than you can imagine. I have far more things to eat and far more things to drink than are good for me. I indulge in abstemious spells merely to keep my balance.

Wild persimmons make one feel like a hungry man in the woods. As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees. There is nothing more desolate than a persimmon tree, with the old ripe fruit hanging on it. As you see, there is such a thing as being a spiritual epicure.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Deborah Rhode says everything I’d want to say about academic life and “the pursuit of prestige”:

Status hierarchies carry special costs in university life. For most faculty, one of the main motivations for choosing an academic career, and one of its main satisfactions, is intellectual freedom. Professors value having control over their own time, agendas, and priorities. Yet that freedom is diminished when the pursuit of prestige becomes controlling. Moreover, because academic recognition is to some extent a relative good, a large percentage of the profession is bound to come up short. . . .

The solutions are obvious in principle and elusive in practice. The fundamental challenge is for academics to stay focused on their own values, and to make the best use of their abilities in the service of goals that they find most meaningful. Rewards can come from many sources, and not all of them register prominently on the conventional pecking order. Harvard philosopher William James once claimed that “to give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.” Whether or not the satisfactions are truly equivalent, letting go of certain status needs is often far preferable to the alternative.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Art Institute of Chicago has online a virtual trek through the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, the exhibition known as the Armory Show, which introduced American audiences to new directions in painting and sculpture. The museum also has the show’s catalogue and other documents available as free PDFs. Not to be missed: The Cubies’ A B C, a contemporary sendup of Matisse, Picasso, Stein, and others, words by Mary Mills Lyall, illustrations by Earl Harvey Lyall. A sample:

P’s for Picasso, Picabia and Party
(Who deal in abstractions, distractions and such.)
When, with vision chaotic and expletives hearty,
You beg of a Cubie their sense to impart, he
Profoundly makes answer: “In little is much.”
—P’s for Picasso, Picabia and Party.

Did “Picasso, Picabia and Party” inspire “Parker, Pound, or Picasso,” Philip Larkin’s encapsulation of all that he loathed in music, writing, and art? My guess is not likely : Larkin was a thoroughgoing provincial, and capable of derisive alliteration on his own. How provincial? From his 1982 Paris Review interview: “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?”

While teaching some Marianne Moore poems, I invited students to write, if they wanted to (and they did), a two-stanza comment on Moore’s “Poetry,” using the stanza form of another Moore poem, “The Fish.” That five-line stanzas of that poem are organized by a rhyme scheme, AABBC, and a syllable count: one, three, nine, six, eight. Why? Because. I think of Moore’s singular designs in relation to William Carlos Williams’s contention that the poet creates “new forms as additions to nature,” marvelous constructions that take their places among the things of the world.

I too wrote two stanzas. My title is the title of Moore’s poem; thus the quotation marks:

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, warned that when it reports fiscal 2013 third-quarter results on Thursday, losses in its Nook Media division — which includes sales of e-books and devices — will be greater than the year before and that the unit’s revenue for all of fiscal 2013 would be far below projections it gave of $3 billion.

The problem was not so much the extent of the losses, but what the losses might signal: that the digital approach that Barnes & Noble has been heavily investing in as its future for the last several years has essentially run its course.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Yes, this post is the third Hi and Lois post in four days. But you know what Dr. Johnson said: “When a man is tired of Hi and Lois, he is tired of life.” Although it is true that he spoke in the earliest years of this long-running strip.

Chicago’s Harper High School is the subject of twoepisodes of This American Life. The toll of gun violence from the 2011–2012 school year: twenty-nine current and former students shot; twenty-one wounded, eight killed.

If I were one of those people who think that their radios and televisions are sending them secret messages, I would wonder what’s going on here. But I’m not, and I don’t. Far right, that’s a Led Zeppelin poster, nothing more, nothing less. It has nothing to do with Leddy. Still, you gotta wonder.¹

I’d like to know something about the hand that made this lovely piece of commercial art. It appears under the heading “A Chorus of Praise” in an advertisement for AC Spark Plugs. The tiny lettering in the lower left corner appears to be the artist’s name, Allaway. It took two trips to the library, the second with a loupe, to figure that out. Thanks, library. Thanks, loupe. I’ve been unable though to find out anything about the artist.

How many hat-and-glove pairings in this picture signify specific occupations? I see nine before starting to guess. You?

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Says one of the firm’s employees, a receptionist with $100,000 in student loans, “I will probably never see the end of that bill, but I’m not really thinking about it right now . . . . You know, this is a really great place to work.”

One night, at a party at Jack Lemmon’s house, Gene Kelly walked over to me and inquired if I knew where he could get a print of Singin’ in the Rain. He wanted to run the film for one of his kids who had never seen it.

“Gene,” I said, “Films Incorporated has a rental print listed in their catalog. But I simply can’t believe you’re asking me about this. You were the king of the MGM lot. You mean to tell me you don’t have a print of every movie you ever made?”

He smiled sadly. “No, I don’t. Not one of them. You see, Mel, in those days, I would call for a projection room, invite thirty–forty people, and run anything I pleased. Seven nights a week. Any movie I wanted to see. From any studio. And you know,” he concluded, with a catch in his voice, “we thought it would never end.”

Mel Tormé, It Wasn’t All Velvet (New York: Viking, 1988).

My dad put me onto this book. He suspects that I am becoming a Tormé fan. Could be.

[Why “most of you“? Perhaps some of the students have previously tried law school, left, and returned. This post is no. 42 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Monday, February 18, 2013

Tazo Awake was an esteemed brand in our chambers (read kitchen, living room, study). The tea was recently repackaged as Tazo Awake English Breakfast, or as the box would have it, “awake english breakfast.” The 2.0 packaging lacks the Indian design elements and dowdy typography of the old, but it’s acceptable. The problem is that what’s inside has changed. Awake English Breakfast is not Awake.

I’m offering that assertion as a fact, even after calling Tazo and hearing a friendly fellow tell me — after putting me on hold to check — that the Awake blend has remained the same. It hasn’t. The old Awake was a distinctive tea: its instantly recognizable flavor came from a blend of Assam and Ceylon leaves. Awake English Breakfast tastes like any other English Breakfast tea. It’s an adequate black tea. But there’s nothing distinctive about it, and there’s no reason to continue to pay more for it.

My tea-drinking wife Elaine also notices the difference. And we are not alone: of the thirteen reviews on this Tazo page, eleven note that the tea has changed for the worse. As for the other two reviews, one appears to be of the old Awake, and one appears to be from a tea-drinker who is unaware of the change.

Tazo, if you’re reading, please bring back the old Awake. If Coca-Cola can own up to a mistake, you can too.

*

February 20: An e-mail from Tazo says that the blend remains unchanged. But it just ain’t so.

Bill Griffith’s affection for Bil Keane’s The Family Circus is well known. Since the residents of Dingburg’s “humorless enclave” recoil in horror from that strip, it would seem that Griffith must like Hi and Lois too.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Another bit of language from tonight’s Downton Abbey: Mrs. Patmore spoke of how her suitor, Mr. Tufton, was only interested in her for her cooking. He would go on and on, she said, about how he liked his pancakes flipped. No double entendres here: Mrs. Patmore was speaking literally.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces pancake back to approximately 1400. But this use of flip is a fairly new arrival:

trans. orig. and chiefly U.S. To cook by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle, esp. as a job in a fast-food restaurant. Chiefly in to flip burgers.

The OED’s first citation is from the Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1913: “Unknown celebrities . . . The artist with a heart tattooed on his arm, who flips flapjacks in the window of Childs’ restaurant.”

I hadn’t planned to make two such posts in one day. Elaine and I thought that had to be Harriet Sansom Harris (Frasier Crane’s crafty agent Bebe Glazer on Frasier) playing Susan MacClare, Marchioness of Flintshire, in tonight’s Downton Abbey. But no.

Tonight’s show was a Christmas Special. Some Special. I have come to think of Julian Fellowes’s screenplays as bowling balls. The characters are the pins.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

I’ve noticed lately that many readers are leaving two or three versions of a comment. The second and third tries don’t seem to be matters of rethinking things: rather, they suggest that the commenter is uncertain about whether a comment has gone through, or stuck, or whatever the appropriate metaphor might be.

I moderate comments to keep spam and other kinds of unpleasantness from appearing on my blog, which means that comments don’t appear immediately. Not long ago, I added a paragraph to my minimalist comment policy (you see it when you click on a link for comments):

Notice the (easy-to-miss) text that appears at the top of the page after you leave a comment: “Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.” Comments don’t disappear; there’s no need to repost them.

I suppose that this paragraph, like Blogger’s message, is also easily missed.

Reader, keep the comments coming, please. But you can save yourself some tedium if you remember: once is enough.

And while I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace’s commencement address:

There are at least three significant discrepancies between the audio and print versions of the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. The second sentence of this passage, present in Audible’s audio version, is missing from the print version:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in . . . the head. They shoot the terrible master. [Ellipsis in the original.]

And the second sentence of this passage, present in the print version, is missing from the audio:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

The absence of the “terrible master” sentence has been widely understood as an attempt to moderate the tone of a passage that seems to point to Wallace’s suicide. But there is a less conspiracy-minded explanation: Wallace’s publisher used the written text of the address, which would seem to mean that the missing-from-print sentence was an impromptu addition. The missing-from-audio sentence would seem then an impromptu deletion from the written text.

A third discrepancy: some of the details of the end-of-day trip to the supermarket are missing from the audio version. At Kenyon, Wallace skipped this print passage:

and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by

and replaced it with

et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony.

[The print version: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). A handful of words per page, to make a 144-page book. I can’t imagine that Wallace would have been happy about that.]

Saturday, February 9, 2013

The New York Times reports that John E. Karlin, whose work helped to bring about all-digit dialing, has died:

By the postwar period, telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers, but whether users could memorize the seven digits it entailed was an open question.

Mr. Karlin’s experimental research, reported in the popular press, showed that they could. As a result, PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield — the stuff of song and story — began to slip away. By the 1960s, those exchanges, along with DRexel, FLeetwood, SWinburne and scores of others just as evocative, had all but disappeared.

Paul Tanner, a former trombonist for the Glenn Miller Ochestra who played an unlikely role in the history of rock ’n’ roll when, using a device he helped invent, he performed the famous electronic accompaniment on the Beach Boys’ signature recording “Good Vibrations,” died on Tuesday in Carlsbad, Calif.

The Beach Boys’ Mike Love called that device, the Electro-Theremin, a “woo-woo machine.” But it is better known as the Tannerin.

Correction, thanks to Andrew Hickey: Mike Love played a synthesizer, not a Tannerin.

[Mike Love at Michigan State University, October 26, 1966: “Hey man, they expect me to play this woo-woo machine.”]

Friday, February 8, 2013

OS X’s Dictation service is for me both boon and bane. It makes the work of transcribing passages from books wonderfully easy. But the ease is illusory, for improbable, unforeseeable mistakes creep in. And because I cannot anticipate my Mac’s mishearings, the products of Dictation require more careful proofreading than typed text.

Making a page to go with Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem Montage of a Dream Deferred, I tried to get Dictation to recognize boogie-woogie. Some results: boogie-boogie, boogie-looking, boogie-wiki, boogie-Woodkey, Boogie-Woody (almost a Beach Boys title), Boogie-Wookie, okay-Wookie, the de-wiki. Yes, I kept trying out of curiosity. My favorite: boogie-what.

The trick to getting it right: not speaking the hyphen. Dictation might be smarter than I thought.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Sixty-three MBA applicants at Penn State and UCLA have been rejected after admissions officials discovered they had plagiarized parts of their admissions essays, a number that the schools say is likely to increase in subsequent application rounds.

In February 2011, twenty-nine applicants to Penn State’s MBA program were found to have plagiarized in their application essays. In February 2012, a dozen applicants to UCLA’s Anderson School of Management were found to have done the same.

MBA programs could do our culture and economy a favor by sharing miscreants’ names across institutions. Students who cheat when the stakes are so high have, I would say, no business getting MBAs (or any other professional degrees). Think of the disregard for integrity such students would carry into their careers.

[Re: some of the cases: I’m not persuaded that plagiarism can be excused by an appeal to differing cultural attitudes about the use of source material. There is much to suggest that assertions of such differences are part of the folklore of teaching.]

I missed this one: the venerable name Muzak will give way to Mood. Thanks, Adair, for passing on the news.

In my college years, I absorbed thousands of hours of Muzak while working as a stock clerk in a Two Guys discount department store. Yes, I had the Muzak in me. What I remember of it: trombones. Every song seemed to have a trombone front and center. The programming intensified the loneliness of our shabby housewares department. Slow stuff: it fit. Peppy stuff: ah, ironic.

Listening to Muzak, late on, say, a Friday night, straightening up a badly-lit, customer-free aisle of ironing boards and clothespins and clothespin bags: no wonder I fancied myself an existentialist.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

[Life, April 2, 1956. Illustration by William A. Smith. Click for a larger view.]

The text, if you’d rather not squint:

He is everybody’s trusted friend . . .

Most of the time you see him coming up the walk in a blue-gray suit with a leather bag slung over his shoulder. But you may remember him also in army fatigues or navy blues, when his familiar cry of “Mail!” was the most welcome sound in all the world. And there was a time when he wore a buckskin jerkin and rode fast ponies over dangerous trails few others dared to travel.

You call him the Postman or Mailman . . . and every day he is waited for and watched for by millions of people whose hearts beat faster when they see him coming.

He is the link that unites scattered families, the bearer of precious letters from absent sons and daughters. He is a bringer of hopes and joys and Yuletide spirit. He is the eternal consolation of separated lovers.

Once the bearer of dispatches was the exclusive emissary of kings and princes and powerful lords. In America he is everybody’s ambassador . . . and everybody’s trusted friend.

He stands for something pretty big. A kind of integrity so sure and unquestioned that you take it for granted as one of the verities of life. He comes like day and night — in rain or sleet or snow — when the pavements are cold enough to numb his feet or hot enough to fry an egg. Today there are 130,000 Postmen serving our needs, and to every one of them your sealed letters are “top secret.”

[“Model post office a teacher set up in the classroom for the children to learn about the mail system.” Photograph by Nina Leen. Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1948. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

The Postal Service is expected to announce on Wednesday morning that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages, a move the financially struggling agency said would save about $2 billion annually as it looks for ways to cut cost.

As Utnapishtim said, “There is no permanence.” This change feels to me like a very big deal, but I imagine that I will adjust in no time.

Well, that people seemed happy. I mean, I thought they’d be getting depressed, worried about age, very worried about the economic climate, looking back on their lives, maybe sometimes with regret. But no, I mean, what was so interesting to me was that, you know, that a lot of them had found real kind of comfort in their families and their extended families.

I was of the belief in my life that you can’t have everything, you know, that I have pursued a career, I was ambitious, and I paid a price for it. I wasn’t as good a father or a husband as I should have been. And sometimes I thought, well, maybe that’s my way, and maybe that’s the right way. But then I saw the payoff, that people who’d put their energies into their families and their loyalties into their families, that at this age, in their mid-fifties, you know, they’ve got real pleasure and power from it.

Pleasure and power? I don’t really know what that means. Pleasure and sustenance? Yes. Gross goes on to ask whether the film’s subjects are really happy or just saying so for the camera. Sigh.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

There is a reference to “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office in Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011).

That’s one ungainly sentence. Notice the long chain of prepositional phrases: to boxes, of Blackwing pencils, from White’s office, in Martha White’s introduction. The sequence from White’s office in Martha White’s introduction is especially clumsy. (It must have been a small office.) Embedding the book title’s two prepositional phrases in yet another prepositional phrase adds a final awkward touch. What I think happened here: having taken a quick look at the book, I was concerned more with getting the data in one place — the quotation, the writer’s name, the book’s part and title, the date of publication — than with writing a good sentence.

I saw right away that I needed to rethink the sequence of elements in the sentence: it’s appropriate to put what’s most important at the end, right? So here’s an improvement:

In Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011), there is a reference to “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office.

Better, yes. And notice that the three references to Whites are better distributed in the sentence. But look at “There is a reference.” It should be easy to make the sentence shorter and livelier by cutting the verb to be and the nominalization reference and adding a transitive verb in the active voice:

Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011) mentions “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office.

Much better. Notice that dropping is and a reference means fewer prepositional phrases. Minus the two of the title, the sentence drops from five to three, and from twenty-five words to twenty.

[This post is no. 41 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. This post is the first to improve my writing. Many guides to writing suggest replacing to be (when appropriate) with a transitive verb in the active voice. The advice appears in The Elements of Style, or “Strunk and White”: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.”]

[Egg on face: I’d forgotten that Blackwing Pages called attention to Levenger’s advertising copy last year, in one of the very posts I link to below: Facts, Fiction, and the Palomino “Blackwing Experience.” E. B. White though is a new addition to the chorus of Palomino praise-singers.]

I’m reminded of the Dashiell Hammett story in which the Continental Op looks at a sign in a bar — “ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE” — and begins to count the lies. No, Steinbeck, White, and Wolfe never sang the praises of the Palomino Blackwing, because they lived and died before that pencil came into production. To claim that these writers sang the praises of a Palomino product is equivalent to claiming that Blind Boy Fuller sang the praises of my National guitar. No, because my guitar is a replica. And so is the Palomino Blackwing.

California Cedar has chosen, again and again, to promote its products by invoking the names of prominent people, among them Duke Ellington, John Lennon, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all of whom lived and died before the Palomino Blackwing and thus could never have used that pencil. What’s more, there is no evidence that Ellington or Lennon or Wright had any particular allegiance to the original Blackwing. (Nor to my knowledge is there evidence that White sang the praises of the original Blackwing.) Facts are stubborn things, as someone once said.

[I’ve invoked the Op before, when writing about an “old-fashioned recipe” for lemonade. Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011) mentions “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office. Well-known photographs show White composing at the typewriter. Roger Angell’s foreword to the fourth edition of The Elements of Style describes White composing at the typewriter “in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between.”]

The United States Postal Service honors Rosa Parks, born February 4, 1913. Also in the news: because of a conflict between relatives and executors, Parks’s archives sit in a Manhattan warehouse, unavailable to scholars: The Rosa Parks Papers (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly).

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Professor Charles Kingsfield, explaining why his midterm examination will not focus on landmark cases and may instead include landmark cases, obscure cases, and hypothetical cases:

“I intend to test minds, not memories.”

[From The Paper Chase, “An Act of Desperation,” first aired December 19, 1978. Elaine and I are watching episodes of the show on DVD. We both like the goofy warmheartedness. Think of it: a television series about people studying. And no study guides.]

“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. It is, to my mind, one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.” Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by
e-mail.

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